


Night Watch

by snagov



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Light Angst, Love Confessions, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Pining, Starmaker Crowley, The Night At Crowley's Flat (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:07:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25158235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: Stars fell for you, Aziraphale,he wants to say.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61





	Night Watch

"Do you want the window?" 

"No, dear, I'm quite alright," the other man says, shifting in the bus' bucket seat. His spine trying to make a compromise with the hard plastic. He pats at the waistcoat over his belly and adjusts his pocketwatch.

"Are you sure?" The first man is long and narrow. Some might mistake him for a shoehorn in black denim. They wouldn't be entirely wrong.

"Yes. Don't fuss."

Fat lot of that happening. Crowley presses his forehead to the window and watches the night sky pass. It is clear and cloudless, the world lit only by starlight. See the North Star, find Serpens and Cassiopeia. Like a sailor on open water, learn to map yourself by your position beneath the starry sky.

He knows the stars, has hung them all, yet he has no idea where they are.

Aziraphale doesn't speak while they exit the vehicle, dropping an uncounted handful of coins into the bus driver's till. He doesn't speak while they look both ways and cross the street (you know how lorries can be), stopping before Crowley's sleek building. He doesn't speak in the lift nor the hall, nothing at all while Crowley unlocks the door and lets them inside. He wishes Aziraphale would say something. Anything. The silence is growing damnably loud. He tries to fill it up with other noises, other sounds. Drops his keys with a loud clatter on the hall table. Kicks his boots off against the wall. 

The strange feeling of the night reminds Crowley of another night seventy-eight years ago. His hands had been very tight on the steering wheel and his tongue between his teeth. They had both kept a suspicious watch on the dark sky above, looking for fire. "Come inside," Aziraphale had said, holding a leather bag of books between his knees. _Come and see._ He had felt like a wire stripped bare then. When he blinked, he could still only see a white-haired angel standing in the middle of a church. The barrel of a gun. Rubble. Spilled holy water. 

"It's getting late."

"Does that matter?" The question had come couched in a soft voice. No, it doesn't matter. It's never mattered. "Please come in. I've missed your company, my dear." 

Crowley had swallowed and nodded, setting himself up to climb upon his own cross. He had followed Aziraphale to the door, running a hand along the brim of his hat and locking the Bentley behind him. "Can I get you something?" Crowley asked, bent upon the sofa. He was long and narrow then, just as he is now. His face showed exhaustion carved into it as obviously as cuneiform. Lines at his mouth. Lines under his eyes. He has bags beneath his eyes that could carry all his worries and the world’s too.

"No, dear, I'm quite alright," the other man said, shifting in his wingback chair. His spine tried to make a compromise with both the angle and cushion. He patted at the waistcoat over his belly and adjusted his pocketwatch. "Besides, I do believe this is _my_ shop, I should be offering refreshments to you. Here, I have a bottle open."

“What are you drinking?”

“According to the label, I believe this is intended to pass for wine. ”

“Does it?”

“The more I have of it, perhaps a bit.”

“Give it over.” Crowley had taken the bottle and poured the wine. He sat back and swirled it in the glass, cupping the stem with uncertain hands. Somewhere outside, the dark swathe of the firmament sparkled with unseen constellations above them. 

"Crowley, I have something to confess to you."

He looked up, uneasiness wrinkling his forehead. "Spit it out, angel."

Aziraphale had been unsettlingly still. He reminded Crowley of the charred bodies at Pompeii, their ashen corpses still in their chairs. The smell had hung around the city for years. Decades, really. 

“I missed you while you were away. A great deal, I’m afraid. I worried we might never have this again.”

Bombs fell over London. Sometimes the flash around the blackout curtains looked a little bit like fire. He curled his lip, hoping there would be nothing to bury in the morning. The way Aziraphale looked at him spilled the secret. It had been there in the set of his mouth and the look of his eyes. “Please don’t,” Crowley whispered, closing his eyes. “I’m begging you.”

“Oh.” Faintly-voiced and full of hurt.

_Fuck._

“No, look,” he interrupted, fumbling at his sunglasses. Some things need to be said bare-faced. “I just - just you can’t tease me, angel. I’m not a liar and you’re not cruel.”

“What do you mean?”

He cleared his throat, suddenly thick and nervous. “What you’re - going to say. What you’re thinking." He spread his palms wide and when he spoke his voice was low. "Where would we go from there?"

"I don't know," Aziraphale looked truly miserable. Crowley wanted to reach out and tuck his hair back, to brush it from his forehead. He wanted those strong, capable hands to do the same to his own. What could he offer? Nothing in this world or likely the next. A love poem for a vacant lot. A love poem for a bombed-out building. A love poem for the fire they stole and didn't get to keep. He had swallowed the spit in his mouth and looked away, chin in his hand. There was no sky to look at. Blacked out. Crossed out. Outside, the earth rattled. Crowley closed his eyes, rubbing the bridge of his nose between tired fingers.

"Tell me in about eighty years, angel. Give or take a few." Aziraphale had looked bewildered and opened his mouth to argue. Crowley had held up a hand. "Just trust me. Just this once. Please."

For once in six-thousand years, Aziraphale had bit his lip and nodded without complaint. Now, looking at him, those white teeth in the meat of his lower lip once more, Crowley half-expects the bombs to fall again. Aziraphale stands stock still in the dark hallway, blinking. His hand halfway to his chest, as if paused while moving to shed his coat. Nearly eighty years later and Crowley still has never brushed a curl from his forehead. His hands twitch at his sides. Strange how things have a habit of repeating themselves. Once again, here they are alone in a dark room while the world ends around them. 

"Nothing's coming right now," Crowley finds himself saying. "They'll need time to regroup. Don't panic." 

"I'm not - " Aziraphale shakes his head, the bush of pale curls catching what light leaks through long windows. When he frowns again, his focus is trained on Crowley. "How did you do that? Stop time?"

Crowley stares, half-turned toward the kitchen with half a mind toward the bottle of 1995 California syrah still corked in his refrigerator. "Huh? I've stopped time before. You've been there." 

"Yes, but - " Aziraphale furrows his brow. "Crowley, you stopped _Satan himself._ " The confusion is knit upon his face. "However did you manage that?"

 _Oh._ "Just could, I guess."

"I'm not a fool, Crowley. And you're not a liar."

"Yeah, well, first time for everything." He's tired. The exhaustion builds a home between his shoulder blades. "Come on, then. Not sayin’ a word without a drink or five." Or five-hundred. You get the idea.

"You've never been this quiet in your life," Aziraphale observes.

"Just thinking."

"About what?"

"Time." 

"Were there world enough and time." Aziraphale quotes.

"Indeed."

"My dear, we're nearly through it."

"Are we?"

"I choose to look on the bright side. You look as if you've seen a ghost."

Crowley is silent, chewing on the inside of his lip. He doesn't know how to explain that everyone he sees is a ghost. You see, this is not the first time the world has ended. Nor the second, nor the third. Nor the hundredth. This one is, however, quite different. They have never made it quite so far before.

Aziraphale sighs, closing his eyes. It’s easier like this sometimes, when Aziraphale isn’t looking at him. When Crowley doesn’t have to think about what his reluctant smile has given away, how he has betrayed himself. Here, he can see the little twilight cling to Aziraphale’s skin like black ice to a road. He can pick out each individual eyelash, each fleck of leaf-green in blue irises. From here, there is a wealth of nearly-white hair falling across a wide forehead. There is an easiness to the fingers at the stem of the wine glass. That familiarity of long practice, like a cook might finger a beloved knife. 

Crowley has fallen, of all the miserable things, in love. That’s the trouble with hearts. You cannot reason with them. They don’t listen to logic. You cannot say _I can’t fall in love now, it’s not a good time. How about next Thursday?_ No, it doesn’t work like that. Never has. He _wants_. It feels monstrous to want someone like this. He is unused to this kind of desire. The one sewn up in exposure. Unused to loving ache, to tender want, to being so _fucking_ incomplete. Sometimes it hurts to be in love. Sometimes, he's tired of it. There's a secret in his pocket. He should confess. He knows this and shifts his hips uncomfortably against the counter. Still, he's afraid Aziraphale will blame himself. Worse, still, _what if you're angry?_

He is afraid of saying _I love you._

What if Aziraphale asks _how long?_

* * *

Someone has to be the firstborn. 

It hadn't been him. Crowley, who had borne another name in those days, was the fourth. By the time he had been created and anointed with a name and purpose, Lucifer had already claimed the top spot. But that had suited him fine, he had never been cut out for a leadership role. 

His siblings were the Archangels. He was just Aion. 

His mother was the Lord. His father was the Dark. Aion had been born with a complication, wrapped in a caul of light. He was the first evolution, bringing brightness into the world. They hadn’t known what to do with him, this bright spot in the middle of the night. His mother had told him he was special and asked him to make her things. He'd scribbled on the dark for her and she hung these messes up on the sky like art on a refrigerator. When mankind came later, they would call them stars. 

His father resented him. His mother confided in him too much. _I have a special job for you,_ She had said. She had just created the Seraphim, entrusting their command to each of the Archangels oh high. Aion had looked skeptically around for Gabriel or Michael. He didn't like any of them save for Lucifer. Everyone liked Lucifer.

_What is it?_

_I have created Time. Instead of taking command, I need someone to watch the door to spacetime. Make sure no one comes or goes that shouldn't._

_Who shouldn't?_

_Everyone._

_How will I know if one is different?_

_I'll burn a bush._

It had been dark and empty, a golden chair at the end of a long, echoing hall. He had sat before a locked door, throwing darts at passing comets. His mother came by to ask for a cup of light for an Earth she was making. He had cut a lock of his hair and rolled it into a ball and called it a sun. 

Few came to see him. When they did, they wanted something. 

Once Heracles had visited, asking if he could hold the door open. He had wanted to see if he was strong enough. Atlas may have fallen for his tricks but Aion hadn't. He'd rolled his eyes and shaken his head. In between letting the world in and out, he had knitted stars and placed them in the sky. When the Universe ended, he'd swept up the stars and the comets, the asteroids and the nebulae, and dumped them on God's desk. She'd breathed life back into them as human beings. So it goes. He had hung more stars. From his seat at the door, he watched yet another First Day dawn. In each Age, a Garden. It always begins there, somewhere bright and green nestled between two rivers like thighs. Aion could smell the earth and the air all the way from the end of time. He'd inhaled it deeply, holding the spark of life in his lungs, swearing someday he'd live in a garden and not a tomb. 

The angels went to Earth and walked with mankind. Aion could only watch. That’s the trouble with fire. He can look but he can’t touch. The world ends one day, taking Heaven and Hell and everything with it but the Lord and her bouncer at the door of time. The nothingness between existences is dark and silent. Like blinking. Like drawing a breath. He waited for Her signal, then opened the door. Bang. The world again. Time is a circle. A spiral. A snake with its tail on its tongue. Here we go round again.

Clickity-clack. Don't look back.

* * *

He picks at his cuticles and glances at Aziraphale from between strands of his wild red hair. Aziraphale is quietly shaking his head, his eyes wide. 

Aziraphale frowns. “How many times has this happened? The world and everything? The whole - end of it?”

“Thousands.”

A slow inhale. "If you were never an angel - Crowley, what were you?"

He pauses, remembering who he was and who he might have been. If he were to find his way back to that door, he might go through it and find himself there again.He thinks of she-wolves and chimeras. Sphinxes and hydras. He thinks of Geryon, who had been too large for the world he had lived in. Who had had three faces and six wings, who had kept sheep and wanted to love something. Just once. Just the once. He glances at Aziraphale, his face impassive.

"I was the first light," he says. "The first star." _I was the fire you keep giving away._

 _I love you._ Love is complicated. Love is strange. Love is a many-splendored thing. Love is a gilded cage, an oubliette, a recipe for ruin. Love, his own love, is a poison. He doesn’t know why he came down here, what of himself he’d even thought to offer. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, in his pocket corner of the Universe.

 _Stars fell for you, Aziraphale,_ he wants to say. But he’s no poet, so he stuffs his hands in his jeans and shrugs instead. 

* * *

Each time, Aion had watched the Guardian of the Eastern Gate stand nervously on the wall, swordless and uncertain. He wanted to reach out and say something, offer reassurance. 

_They always eat the apple,_ he wanted to say. 

_You did the right thing, you're an angel,_ he wanted to say. He had been too far away then, so he said nothing at all. In every cycle, the angel gives his sword away. In every cycle, Aion watches and hands his heart over. 

He's got starlight under his fingernails and nebulae dust on his palms. What a mess. He smears his hand across the firmament, wiping the mess off. He likes the look of it after, like fingerpainting with the Universe. He gives the smear a name. The Pillars of Creation. He wonders if it's the sort of thing the angel might like. _Stars were born for you,_ he wants to say. If that were ever the sort of thing he might say. Sometimes he wants to creep closer to the angel. Aziraphale, the name is. The same name in every Age. He gets up from his carved chair at the door and moves closer, tripping as he does over the golden manacle on his ankle. Later, confined to his cushion and rubbing the ache out of his skin, he wonders if anyone has ever slipped their chains off. 

When Lucifer hangs around him later, trading choir-gossip, Aion asks him this. Really, in a sense, when you look at the Fall, it's all his own fault. Though, if you were never an angel, can you truly Fall? 

The Lord came to him and Aion had handed over a letter of resignation. 

_I want to leave my post. Let me go to Earth. Let me change this, I can't bear to watch it again. I'll do anything._

_Anything?_ The Lord had asked. 

_Yes._

_There will be a price._

_Always is._

_When you awake, you will behold a choice. I will create you in a new form, one unseen yet. In the Garden, I will plant an apple tree. The choice is yours, Aion. Lead mankind to the Tree and I will grant you this wish, though you will Fall and your name be stripped from you. If you choose to not tempt them, then you may return to your place at the door._

_If I do not, then the cycle repeats?_

_Yes._

_And if I do, it won't?_

_If you do, I shall grant you the power to stop time. You may use that to change the world as you wish._

_Right. Yeah. Okay._

So on and so on. Amen.

* * *

In the Beginning, he woke on his belly, scales to the soil. Born into a bed of eucalyptus and hawthorn leaves. The sun burned against his dark scales. Roses and hibiscus dotted the horizon. Okra grew next to lichen and pines next to palms. The world had not been so big yet. In the Beginning, you could have held it in the palm of your hand.

Eden again. Four strong walls, a door. The world was born as a petting zoo. The free never think of running off. Give a man a large enough cage and he’ll call it a country. A slow blink. He looked upward, watching the sun move across the pale sky. He looked eastward. There will be a wall there. There always is. An angel in a white linen robe would be standing upon it. Just like every time. Some things don't change so easily. 

He had never actually _been_ to the Garden before. It was different up close. Crawly took his time learning the feel of cool grass on his skin, the taste of freshwater. Salt and sand. He remembered the names of each fruit and vegetable, now he paired taste and smell with them.

He liked pears. Hated plums.

Interesting.

The first Age was that of Gods. The angels walked the Earth and mankind watched them glow, bringing them burnt offerings. God hadn't liked that. In the second age, the angels were more careful. Still, they let their preferences slip through, betting on men like horses at a race, slipping miracles into their pockets. That had been the Age of Heroes. God hadn't liked that much either. He wondered what this Age would be called.

This time he stands next to the angel, both barefoot on the Eastern Wall. It's his first time taking human form but he doesn't say anything, pretending as if he wears hands and feet everyday. He wipes his damp palms on his black shift, trying to get the brimstone and nitrogen out. 

"Oh, I do hope I did the right thing," the angel says. 

"You're an angel," Crawly drawls, pulling out his practiced line. "Don't think you can do the wrong thing."

The rain comes. Aziraphale holds a wing over his head. Crawly flushes. 

"I just don't have any idea how to explain where they got fire," Aziraphale says, fretting. 

"You can blame it on me, angel," he says.

Seventeen centuries later, he comes across a painting of Prometheus with red hair and yellow eyes. It’s all he has left of fire now, the bright of his eyes and the burn of his hair. Sometimes, when he licks his lips, he tastes sparks. 

* * *

"Crowley," Aziraphale whispers. 

"Wait - " Crowley says, holding up a thin hand. "I haven't finished." 

The story is a long one. They have all night. Nights are long anyway. He doesn't need any help in making them longer. Sometimes he wonders how men feel, watching the ends of their lives rush toward them like a fallen thing kisses the ground. Maybe the nights feel shorter when yours are numbered. How many nights does he have left? It's hard to say. This is new territory. He drinks deep from his cabernet, the tannins staining his tongue and mouth a rich red. It's dark. His side aches. He ignores it, figuring Christ had had it worse. 

"You're telling me that time is a - " Aziraphale's brow furrows, knitting together. "A circle?"

"A spiral. Here," he says. Crowley fetches an apple from the kitchen. He slowly drags a paring knife against it, cutting the peel off into a neat spiral. "Look," he says, offering the apple peel. "This is time."

He takes a bite from the naked fruit. Aziraphale frowns. 

"The idea that this Universe is repeating, that Earth is repeating, over and over and over again? It's real. I don't know how many times. Haven't counted." Crowley shrugs. His hair falls in his face, still full of grit and smelling of burnt paper. He could miracle it clean. Could, but doesn't.

"Are you saying you remember them? Each repetition?"

"Yeah. I watched over space-time. That was my charge. Well, it was - till I gave it up."

"Why?" Aziraphale looks to him, his eyes wide and blue as the Earth from far away. "Why did you do this?"

"Please don't ask me that."

"Crowley."

"Angel, please. Ask me anything but that."

He is half-tired and half-sick. He knows what he is. Look at him, lined and drawn. He loves with apology. _I’m sorry that I love you. I’m sorry it’s me. I’m sorry I couldn’t cut the heads off my love, couldn’t cut out my heart: I should have tried harder, should have loved you better._ He is not beautiful. No, just look at him. His chin is too sharp. His skin is too lined and sallow at the seams. His eyes are the color of jaundice and warning. He smells of fire and sulphur, salt and sweat. Blood and the tar of carbolic soap. His hands know no kindness to offer but a quick death. 

Across every birth and death of the world, he loves Aziraphale still. He thinks it’s strange how humans can invent clocks and watch time run in a circle and still not know the truth of it. Here we go again, round and round. Tickety-tock and all that. He wonders what it’s like to not be in love. Sometimes he resents Aziraphale. But that’s never quite true, he just resents his own heart. 

How much time do we have left? Each cycle is a little bit different. This time he watches computers rise and he wonders if men are being phased out. Everything is finite. Everything can be improved.

“That’s a myth,” someone had said once to him, speaking of progress. 

Myths are only histories from another turn of the wheel. 

* * *

What would you do to be alone with the one you love?

What would you do to be alone?

What would you?

_Please, Lord, are you listening?_

_I am. Are you certain? You cannot return._

_Yeah,_ Aion-who-would-not-be-Aion said. _I'm certain._

_Give me a kiss then, my child. It's a long way down._

Goodbye to your throne. Goodbye to your body, to the hair on your head and the blood in your veins. Goodbye to the room you were born in, goodbye to the rain out past the window. Goodbye to the sound of the door opening and closing. 

Goodbye to your mother. Goodbye to your name.

* * *

To go above ground, he had been given a body. He had always been curious about taking a physical form, peering down at the rutting earth with a skeptical brow raised. I won’t come to _that,_ he had thought. That was before he felt fire in his skin. Desire is no light thing. His form had come standard-issue for the supernatural, blank between the legs. Desire doesn’t come from there, a cock is only a pressure valve. He’d walked around for four decades with a constant throb before manifesting a dick and pulling at himself till he painted a cave wall white.

Where did God go? She gave him a body and put him on Earth and then took the phone off the hook. Typical. 

It had taken centuries for him to learn that desire is only blood and blood is water. The desire is the tide coming into meet the shore. To live in a body is to need. To beg for touch. A kiss, a brush of the hand, a bed wide enough for two. We are mostly water, no wonder we're always reaching for the shore.

"What are you thinking?"

"Nothing important," Crowley says, drinking deeply and running his palm across his face.

"Please, my dear. Indulge me."

He sighs. "Just had a thought. Ridiculous, really. Did you ever meet James Clark Ross? The explorer?"

Aziraphale looks puzzled. Even in his confusion, he's elegant. The moonlight gleams from behind where he sits, setting his curls alight like a halo. It catches on his upturned nose, the bends and folds of his ancient face. "I'm afraid I did not."

"Elegant sort," Crowley mutters into the glass. "You'd have liked him, angel. Had a pair of gloves for each day of the week."

"Lovely," Aziraphale says, amused.

"Anyway. In 1850, he sailed into the Arctic to look for a pair of lost ships. His best friend had been a captain of one of them. Hadn't seen him in five years. Got all that way and found only buttons. Bones. A knife too, I think. Or maybe that came later. Can't remember." He thinks about the way the rescuers had dug in the dirt, finding spoons and tin cans. He wonders what the next world will find of them in it, what sort of ghosts from this time will come through to the next. Perhaps in the next world, there will be a new chapter and verse in the Bible, telling of a demon and angel holding hands while the Earth burned.

"Crowley, what in Heaven does that have to do with us?"

"Just - too little, too late. Suppose not everything can be saved?" 

"Oh, my dear," Aziraphale sighs. "Don't fret."

"Just being realistic."

"I hate realism. It's so terribly dark."

"Sorry."

"Do you miss it?" Aziraphale asks. He's got one hand on Crowley's knee and the other cupped in a fist. A hot flush races from his thigh to his chest to his neck to his pale face, embarrassing him across his own cheekbones. "Heaven? Do you - regret leaving?"

Once, Heaven was bright and wide. Once, there was only pale sky and gentle breezes. There had been rivers of golden and columns of marble. "No," Crowley says, shaking his head, digging his socked heels into the concrete floor. He means every word. He watches the angel's mouth as he speaks, hoping to be kissed. He wants to say something. Where are the words like buckets, something he can put everything into? A word to mean everything, a word to cross the simple distance. 

You across the table, you on the other sofa. Your worried face, your parted lips. _I'm sorry for everything,_ he wants to say. Doesn't say. The starlight comes in, filling the living room. It feels empty and strange. Sharp angles and modern, clean leather. At the end of the hall, a throne to sit on and no door to open. The trees whisper and the flowers murmur. Crowley's chest aches. He looks around this empire of nothing, feeling pushed up against a wall and looking down the barrel of a rifle.

"It's our hubris," a man had said once on television. "We've created this world and now we've got to live with it." Crowley had thought it's strange that anyone on Earth ever identified with Victor. Look, you're the monster. I'm the monster. We've always been the monster. This rock is our ice floe, left alone somewhere very cold. We're the abandoned ones. Born broken, named a horror.

“You left your post.”

“Resigned, really,” Crowley says, scratching the back of his neck. He doesn’t explain the trade. God had held the papers out to him, told him to sign his name on the dotted line. Once the ink was dry, the cloud had been pulled out from under him. It had been a long fall from the top to the bottom. A million light years to be exact. It didn’t matter. She had promised they wouldn’t start the Earth without him. She hadn’t sealed the promise with a rainbow but she kept it all the same. 

Aziraphale’s eyes are pale and wide. “Why?”

_You don’t want to know that. Don’t ask me that._

“S’not important.”

“You Disobeyed, Crowley.”

“Well, I did _ask - “_

Aziraphale shakes his head. “You questioned. Why?”

 _Because I loved you._ It's summer but he smells fire still. It's summer but he feels very cold. "If we don't make it through tomorrow - "

"Don't talk like that."

He breathes heavily. It's a cosmetic thing, breathing, but he's made a habit of it. "Aziraphale," he tries again. "If we don't make it through tomorrow, I want - " He pauses. "Do you remember the church? And do you- " _Do you remember after?_

"Yes," Aziraphale says quietly. "Always."

"That night," Crowley murmurs, rubbing an uneasy thumb over his dark sleeve. He looks up, catching Aziraphale's eye. "What were you trying to say? Were you - “I’ve watched you for a long time, angel,” Crowley sighs. “And I’ve loved you every single time.” 

He glances at where Aziraphale sits, his hand in a fist and squeezing his eyes tightly shut, then looks away. An apple on the table, half-peeled. His spread out hands. The knife. He wants to play Johnny, pass the time and see if he wins. What’s a little blood in the end?

“Sorry, angel,” he mutters to his hands.

The hand that cups his face is, for once, not his own. He blinks into a frank and pale stare. 

“I have waited eighty years to hear that,” Aziraphale whispers, watching Crowley’s thin mouth. 

“Seventy-eight.”

Aziraphale shakes his head, betraying a smile. “You’re impossible.”

His heart aches. "I try," he murmurs with a miserable smile. _I love you._ Words like baking soda and vinegar, an explosion ready to blow off his jaw. _I love you I love you I love you._ Imperfect words. They get stuck on the dismount, get stuck between our teeth. Get a toothpick, pull it out, love stuck in our mouths. We’ll never be satisfied until we say it. _Get it out get it out get it out._ He has always wondered how humans experience love. Now he knows, a supernova in the chest, gooseflesh, the way a wave swells at the sight of land. Like a Kansas tornado loves to smash transformers, loves to watch the sparks hit the ground. Like a wildfire. Yes, like a wildfire and like the deep sea, places where there is no oxygen.

When Aziraphale kisses him, he wonders how he's gone so long without. There's a mouth at his mouth, overturning the tables in the Temple. There's a stranger at the gate. “Come to bed, dearest,” a soft voice says. He goes, hand-in-hand, laying his love out across cotton sheets.

"You're gorgeous," he whispers to the curve of Aziraphale's ear, to the space between his thighs, to his open mouth.

He wonders what this Age will be called. And the next one too.

 _Stars fell for you, Aziraphale,_ he thinks. _If we get another chance, I'll do it all over again._


End file.
